Small Business Websites and SEO

The truth about small business websites and SEO

Small business websites and SEO packages come in all shapes and sizes, varying greatly in cost, and it’s really difficult for sole traders or small teams to get clarity about what they really want or need.

With more than 1,000 websites under our belts, we can help you make some down-to-earth decisions.

First things first: Your website

Firstly, you need a website. Full stop. While there might be some rare exceptions, every small business today needs to have a web presence because it can anchor and focus your online efforts, making it easier for Google to help connect you with customers.

Secondly, care and thought need to go into the content you put on your website. As Steve explains in this article, Is Your Website A Dog’s Breakfast?, while a good, clean website is key (like a nice, clean dog food bowl), it has to hold appetising content to be useful.

While we pride ourselves on crafting websites to meet any budget, it’s a pretty safe rule of thumb to understand that the more effort you put into your site, the more likely you are to get results from it. That effort can be done for you by professionals like the Talked About Marketing team, or can done by you and your team (if you have one), or you can take a hybrid approach (we help set out what’s needed, you take a first pass as the task, and then we help tidy and sharpen up your wonderful input).

As a result of this flexibity, it’s difficult to truly put a general price on what a website costs. That said, we can usually craft packages ranging from $1100 to $5000 covering the basics right up to more involved ecommerce sites.

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Updating Your Website

Your website is up and running but how can you ensure it keeps running safely and efficiently? Just like offices and shops need cleaning and maintenance, so, too, do websites.

Developers regularly post updates to WordPress, and while you can incorporate a discipline of attending to this regularly, we’ve found most business people are too stretched and stressed running their businesses to pay appropriate attention to technicalities like updates. That’s why we offer our WordPress Website Care Plan.

Understanding SEO

Safe in the knowledge your website is staying up-to-date, you can prudently turn your attention to SEO or Search Engine Opitimsation. This relates to making sure your content wording and structure matches the needs, questions, and queries of your target market(s), which can include customers as well as people or bodies who refer work to you.

Ultimately, for the sake of this brief overview, you need to have some measurement in place so you can see what parts of your website, what content, what promotions, are successful for you. It closes the loop on your content and SEO endeavours.

For most people, that will mean “sales” but that workd can mean different things in different situations.

For us, it’s about interactions between your ideal audience and your enterprise, which might mean attracting people to make bookings, set appointments, buy tickets, become members, make donations, download podcasts, etc.

This applies whether you’re building a new website or reviewing and refreshing an existing one.

The best small business websites start with a plan

If you choose to work with Talked About Marketing, we’ll work with you to plan ways to get the level of sales you need, which means investigating whether:

  • you’re getting enough people visiting your site(s), if not, we need more, if you are, then we need to see if …
  • your content is clear and compelling enough to give someone confidence to click through and engage, if not, we need to address that, if they are but you’re still not reaching your goals, then we need to see if …
  • you’re offering value to the marketplace that meets needs, delivers value, and is set up to compete strongly, if not, we need to find out why and fix it

Next steps from here?

In summary, there are many tools in the toolkit when setting you up for growing “sales” including:

  • putting rigorous measurement in place to get the facts about your digital performance
  • planning and crafting helpful content to attract leads and convert them into customers or members
  • refreshing or rebuilding your website
  • planning a podcast
  • boosting social media activity
  • using ads on Google and Facebook strategically

Making the right decision can seem daunting, which is why we encourage you to make contact so we can discuss your situation and suggest some ways forward.

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